Website Update / New Writing

The State of the Site

It's been about a year and a half since acb.com was completed for the first time. Back then it looked much different. There was no portfolio for my visual art, about all I had to say was about my book, and the main color was red. These were bizarre times, my friends.

So where do we stand a year and a half later?

A Package of Moods was the anchor of the site back when it began. This was my debut novel, published back in February/March 2016 as a print and digital edition. It sold fairly well at the start, then fell hard. Since that fall it's slowly been improving, especially in bookstores. Additionally, am currently working on expanding more into Vermont, provided a few discussions go well, and seeking new places to the south and west of New York state. Meanwhile, I am continuing my work on The Ember Trade and a couple of new projects which you should be seeing relatively soon.

As far as the portfolio goes I've updated it over the course of this year once it was added to the site and with my recent involvement in the Worldbuilding Magazine it's been updated a bit more with art I've created for that project as well. In this most recent update both the portfolio and blog have been cleaned up with a standardized thumbnail size.

Speaking of Worldbuilding Magazine, I've added a temporary section to the site with links to each issue we've created. If you're not sure what I'm talking about you can read a bit about the magazine here. All but the very first issue feature art or writing that I created. Once we have an official website (hopefully that will be soon) I will redirect people to that.

A New Groove

Now, you may be asking why the sudden reflection and change in the site's look. I could tell you that i wanted to celebrate the 1.5 year anniversary rather than the 1 year or 2 year ones, but the truth is in an effort to improve a small aspect of this website I accidentally broke it. Again. It would seem that I am prone to this sort of thing.

Over the last few weeks I took advantage of the disaster and have been reworking a few sections of the site I thought could be done better. Everything is essentially the same, though you may notice some new graphics and styles, especially on the home page. Also, while the site is nearly complete, I am still having some troubles with the contact form I attempted to create, so until I have that worked out I have removed the contact page. You can still reach out to me over social media or email, those links are just in the "about" page for the time being.

My proudest change is the much cleaner blog and portfolio section, as well as the addition of a few new portfolio items. I am never quite at a standstill with my work and it was time to update the site with a few things I've been working on. You'll find some art from the worldbuilding magazine that I recently posted about in the blog as well as a new set of playing cards inspired by my most recent large-scale writing project, The Ember Trade.

New Exclusive Literature

In addition to the updated look of the site, and a few new additions to the portfolio, I would also like to announce that I will begin posting short stories and flash fiction to the "writing" page of acb.com. The first, 690, is a sample of what's to come. You can read it now right here.

690 and the stories I intend to post in the new Short Stories & Flash Fiction section are a sort of experiment for me. I've never been very good at writing a small amount of text, and I have decided to challenge myself to do just that. I believe it is important to try these things in order to grow and learn more about the craft. So we will see how that goes, but at the very least my goal is to have a few stories available for free to those who come and visit the site. Like everything else here, they will not be uploaded frequently, as I want to take my time and make sure they are strong enough to share.

I'm excited to continue this experiment and share it with you all. Hopefully it goes well.

My Sincerest Gratitude

I just wanted to restate my sincerest gratitude for taking the time to look this site over. Whether you've been checking in on it off and on over the last year (It's been over a year since I started this site and launched A Package of Moods...that's insane) or you've just now discovered it, thank you for your time. Hopefully I can continue to improve the site and my craft, hopefully without breaking anything first again.